How do I love thee? Let me count the Js

I've just read a paper that I found quite astounding. My first reaction was to check the date of publication to make sure it wasn't April 1st. My second was to feel al bit overwhelmed about how little I seem to still know about how we make career decisions. And my third was to start to feel that as career professionals we're up against it as we try to influence the career decision making processes of our clients.

The paper was by Ansel and Duyck, Implicit Letter Preferences in Job Choice,and was published in the Journal of Psychology (1999, Vol 143 (2)). It's based on something called 'name-letter' preference and this is the quite well evidenced finding that we have a preference for things that include the letters in our own names, in particular the initial letters. This preference has been shown to have quite an impact on all sorts of life decisions, such as where you choose to live (suggesting that it's no coincidence that my friend Viriginia lives in Virginia Water) and who you marry.

This paper was looking at the impact this name-letter preference on job choice. It illustrated first that within certain professions there is a higher incidence of people with similar sounding names: apparently, there are an unusual number of dentists called Dennis.
They also conducted some experiments to see what kind of organisations people are more likely to apply for, and found that people say that they are more likely to want to apply to organisations whose names are similar to their own. They conducted one experiment where they made up names of organisations that sounded very much like the participant's name showing for example, that a participant called Kelly, was more drawn to an organisation called Kelokoa nd another using names of real organisations, and showed, for example, that a participant called Jack would be likely to be drawn to a company such as Johnson's or John Lewis.
These effect size was small - the researchers are not suggesting that this is the main basis of most people's career decisions. But the effect is pretty consistent and does make a difference.

So what do we as practitioners do with this kind of information? Well, in truth, the effect size isn't big enough for us to worry too much about. But it makes me thoughtful about two different aspects of our practice. First it suggests that we still have very little understanding of how we make career decisions - for all the decades of research that has gone into the field, we're still nowhere near a complete understanding. The more I read about the research, the more irrelevant the safe and straightforward world of Holland's matching theories, but nothing as comprehensive and easy to understand has emerged to take its place. My second concern is about the huge impact that the unconcsious has on our decision making. Not that I'm suggesting that the unconsious has no part to play in the career decision making processes, but I just struggle to see exactly how our traditional practices can help. Our standard line is to address career issues at a conscious and rational level, but how can we compete with these kinds of unconscious processes that we are quite unaware of, and can't control?